When Everything Feels like the Movies (9 page)

I didn’t want to face everyone upstairs. I could smell the French toast my mom was making. Every once in a while, she decided to be domestic, but it never worked out; she always burned something or gave someone food poisoning. The thing with my family was that we always seemed the most abnormal when we were doing the normal things.

I put on my biggest pair of Jackie O sunglasses and escaped through the window, texting Angela to meet me at the Day-n-Nite. When I got there, I sat in the back booth waiting for her. I kept my glasses on. I was so famous I had to go incognito.

Brooke came over, but I didn’t order anything, I didn’t have any money. She brought me a cup of coffee anyway. Brooke could be good like that sometimes. I always wondered about her name. She just didn’t look like a Brooke. You never think a Brooke is going to be some fatty whose neck folds remind you of a vagina. You don’t think of a fifty-year-old waitress who looks like she’s never been to the dentist. You think of a Brooke as some blonde bitch in L.A. with perky tits and a phony personality, someone with a white dog named Snowball and a husband who buys her jewellery every time he cheats on her. Someone living the dream life.

Angela was late again, so I looked out of the window at the smoke billowing over the mine. I caught a trucker staring at me through the reflection. He sat at the counter, and I turned to look at him. He smiled, chewing a burger with his mouth open. He wore a hat and a long-sleeved flannel shirt that looked like it had never been washed. Typical Day-n-Nite trucker. He stared at me, and I let him. I don’t know if he thought I was a boy or a girl or if he even cared. I slowly took off my sunglasses and stared back into his beady eyes, looking him up and down, licking my lips. His smile got so big that I could see his cavities. He was practically panting. I started thinking about some porno my mom caught me jerking off to once, one with a perverted truck driver and some dazed and confused hitchhiker. My pants got tighter, and I felt so disgusted with myself that you’d think I’d eaten my mom’s French toast. The trucker’s smile got even bigger as he poked his tongue in his cheek, and his hands disappeared beneath the counter. I picked up my glass of water and started sucking on the straw, slipping my lips down it inch by inch until my eyes started to water. His face got red and blotchy, like he was almost there. I bit my chipped nails as he rubbed his palms on his jeans and panted.

Then I saw Angela through the window and jumped out of the booth, knocking into the table and spilling coffee over the edge of my cup. I air-kissed the trucker as I walked past, like he was a fan. I put my glasses back on and stopped Angela before she came through the door. The trucker spun around so fast to see me leave that he almost broke the seat.

“Where are we going?” Angela asked, pulling her arm away as I dragged her down the street. “I’m hungry!”

“I have no money,” I said. “I tried to steal some of my mom’s tips, but she was too busy playing housewife for me to get a chance.”

“Fuck it,” she sighed, “I have booze bloat. I shouldn’t eat anything anyway.” Angela pulled her phone from her purse to check a text and asked me, “Do you know Mikey K?”

“The dealer?”

“Yeah, Mike Johnson. His mom’s a vet. He has the best Special K.”

“I prefer Cheerios.”

“He’s at the mall. We can meet him.”

“I don’t like Mikey. He poured a can of Pepsi over my head once.”

“Yeah, because you told him you wanted to have sex with his dad.”

“Whatever. He’s an asshole.”

“So forget the asshole,” she smiled, crossing the street to the bus stop. “And fall into a K-hole.”

When the bus came, we sat at the back near a homeless man and some boys who were a few years older than Keef and a few years short of a criminal record. They stared at me for the entire ride, like I was some exotic animal at the zoo. I didn’t know whether to growl or start signing autographs. Angela didn’t say anything about my nose. I don’t think she noticed. Angela didn’t notice anything except missed periods and how many Likes she was getting on Facebook.

We met Mikey K in the mall food court by the photo booths. He was wearing a baseball cap backward, and his jeans were so low on his hips that his ass was hanging out. He had on Bart Simpson boxers, and when I said, “Oh my God, are those Jeremy Scott?” he looked at me like I wasn’t speaking English. Angela hugged him, and he put his hand on her lower back. I tried to remember if his name was written under the table at our booth. He nodded his head at me, the way some guys do instead of actually speaking, and tried to shake my hand. But I couldn’t do the handshake—I could never do them. On the rare occasion that someone was willing to touch my hand, I’d always end up embarrassing myself. I don’t know why Mikey even tried. I guess because I was a client and everything, but he was still kind of awkward, like he was worried I wouldn’t let his hand go.

“So what do you have?” Angela asked.

“We’re thinking of trying K,” I said.

“I won’t have any K until career day.”

“But you’re Mikey
K
,” Angela whined, like she didn’t believe him, like she thought he was keeping it all to himself.

“So what do you have?” I asked.

“Just some bud and a couple hits of acid.”

“Acid!”

“Acid?”

“Five bucks a hit,” he said.

“I have twenty bucks,” Angela said, pulling her makeup and cigarettes out of her purse to find the bill.

They went into the photo booth to do the exchange and were in there for so long that I wondered what else they were doing. I stood awkwardly looking out at the food court until Mikey finally came out. “Later, mang,” he said as he passed me, his jeans even lower.

Angela and I went into the handicapped bathroom which we used to hot-box in all the time when Angela was being a monk or whatever and always wanted to get high and chant Hare Krishnas. She claimed the handicap bathroom at the mall had really good energy, at least when the pregnancy tests she took in it were negative.

“Sink or sin,” Angela said as we took the acid. We stuck out our tongues and stared at our reflections in the finger-smudged mirror. The stamps had pictures of an eternity symbol on them, and we each took two. I could feel them dissolving into my spit. Angela took out her iPhone and stuck out her tongue as the camera flashed.

It didn’t take long for everything to start to change. It was like the bathroom lights were flicking on and off by themselves. I turned on the tap, and the water was so hot that the skin on my hands turned red and peeled, but I couldn’t stop shivering. Angela spun around with both of her arms sticking out like fallen-angel wings, her feathers scraping against the wall and knocking off plaster. I picked up the crumblings and rubbed them on my face like they were mother-of-pearl.

We played music off Angela’s phone, and the bass felt like universes colliding. There was this pervasive boom coming from all around, or maybe from within. We both stood there looking at our reflections, stuck in the beat, our eyes slowly drooping and turning black. It was like we were purely animal. We had no souls.

When the song ended, the boom kept echoing. The colour returned to Angela’s eyes first, and she grabbed my arm, resurrecting me with a gasp. Angela pointed to the door, and I realized someone was knocking. “Mall cop,” she whispered.

The booming stopped, and we heard keys jingling like my mom’s bangles on my wrists, sliding across my scars and catching on my scabs. When the door opened, the mall cop’s moustache was turned up like horns.

“How many times do I have to tell you fucking kids?” He screamed. “It is rude to rave in the handicap bathroom!”

We rushed past him and ran, but for once, it wasn’t just like the movies—he didn’t chase us, and there wasn’t a frenzied sequence of running through the mall, jumping over strollers, pushing grannies off the escalator, and shoplifting along the way. He just stood there and watched us go, clutching the cellphone attached to his belt loop like a gun.

We ran into Wal-Mart where all the smiley faces jumped off the discount signs and bounced on the floor like rubber balls. Water spilled out of the candy aisle, followed by a tsunami of chocolate.

We swam past the cocked firearms, which had grown their own arms and were jerking their load. When they started to fire, we dove under the surface, but then everything started to dry up, and shoppers were getting shot, splitting like a two-for-one discount. The mirrors started to bleed. Someone had summoned Bloody Mary.

“Mommy,” Angela said, holding one of the cashiers at gunpoint with a rifle and emptying a cash register into her purse. The fluorescent lights flickered through my rapid blinks. The blood from the mirrors spilled onto the floor and made the candy water red.

I trudged through body parts to the meat freezer and picked up a package of steaks. My face was reflected in the light shining off the tight plastic wrap. I was suffocating. As I watched, my skin dissolved until I was just a skull. My mouth opened and I screamed, but no sound came out. The package filled with blood, which pushed against the plastic until it burst and spilled over my hands. Soon the freezer overflowed, and even the walls started to bleed. I tried to move, but the blood at my feet was so thick, it was like running in a slow-motion dream. I pinched myself but didn’t wake up.

When I opened my eyes, I was out of breath from running. We were in the schoolyard, and both of our wrists were bleeding. Angela was spinning around with her arms out, making red rain that stuck to my skin. When it dried, I felt like I had been dipped in candle wax.

We dropped to the ground and made snow angels with bloody wings. I rested my head on her shoulder and she held my hand. The sun shone through the cloud of smoke from the mine, shooting toxic rays of light.

“Darling,” she said, “we’re a train wreck.”

“Sweetheart,” I said, “train wrecks always make the front page.”

12

Sunset Boulevard

I
woke up the next morning and rolled to my side, facing my tattered Marilyn picture. I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me, like I was still tripping or something, because there was a tear streaking down her face. It took me a minute to realize that I’d left my window open and melted snow had dripped onto the picture. The tear fit, somehow, like it had always been there. Like the photo was taken right after she’d been raped by a studio exec.

A glance in the mirror showed me that I looked like my mom when she came home from work, her makeup worn off with sweat and dark circles under her misty eyes. I used to wake up every morning when she came home. I’d hear the door creak open and slip out of bed to make sure that it was her. I knew that it would be, but I still had to check. She started to leave me alone some nights, before Ray moved in and Keef was born. Usually Ray would crash at our place, but if he pulled a Houdini, she’d have no choice. She never told me, but I’d wake up, and the house would be empty. I would get out of bed and make sure the door was locked and then crawl under my covers. It would take forever to fall back asleep because every noise would scare me. I usually just stayed awake until I heard her come home. As soon as she walked in, she would flop down on the couch, exhausted. I’d get out of bed and cuddle next to her. She’d run her acrylic nails through my hair, and I’d rest my head on her shoulder, which always smelled like beer and perfume.

“Did you hit the jackpot?” I’d ask, because sometimes we would pretend that she was a Vegas showgirl and we lived in the penthouse of The Mirage.

“They tip me like I’m Nomi Malone,” she said, resting her head against mine, “even when I try to be Martha Graham.”

As I was watching the drop of water slide down Marilyn’s cheek, I remembered I had a joint somewhere and ransacked my nightstand drawer to find it. I got Stoned stoned with me by blowing smoke in her face. She could be so petulant when I didn’t share.

Once I was high, I showered and dragged myself to school for second period, which was gym. Angela wasn’t around (her Twitter said she was at Trey’s “consummating and watching
Girls
”), so I had to sit on the sidelines alone in gym.

When I started to feel too exposed to the paparazzi, I ducked into the change room. I checked out my reflection in one of the mirrors before finding a stall to hide out in. The swelling had gone down on my nose, but I was convinced that it was crooked and that I’d need a nose job, which I was kind of excited about because I was sure it’d get me tons of press.

I lit the roach of the joint I’d smoked earlier as the change room door opened and someone walked in, catching their breath. I looked through the crack in the stall and saw Luke go to one of the urinals. I dropped the roach into the toilet bowl, and he turned his head when it sizzled.

“Who’s blazing?” he asked, flushing and then walking over to the sink to wash his hands. He checked himself out in the mirror, his lips pouting like a reflex, then turned to look at the stalls. “Who’s in there?” he asked, drying his hands on his sweaty shirt. I didn’t answer, so he pushed all the stalls open one by one, and when he came to the one I was in, he flung it open because the lock was busted. “Oh,” he said when he saw me backed against the wall. “It’s just you.”

“Just me,” I nodded.

“Why didn’t you say something? Worried I’d mistake you for a chick?”